---- ALLAN'S PERSPECTIVE ---- The left wing drives me crazy, and the right wing scares the shit out of me!

Allan's Perspective is not recommended for the politically correct, or the overly religious! Some people have opinions, and some have convictions ..., what we offer is Perspective!

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special." Stephen Hawking.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Asshole of the Day: Cop Charged!

Commentary

Well folks, it’s about time ……….., Const. James
Forcillo, who fatally shot 18-year-old Sammy Yatim on an empty streetcar
last month, was charged today with second-degree murder.

Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit announced the charge following its investigation into the July 27 shooting.
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In a separate incident, Oscar Pistorius, otherwise known as the
‘Blade Runner,” was indicted Monday in South Africa on a charge of
murdering his girlfriend.
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Watch out for those Aussies, kids!

A rather bizarre incident happened in
Canberra Australia, when a 70-year-old went to the hospital, saying
that he had lodged a fork in his penis.

The fork was 10 cm long.

The medical personnel might have thought it was a practical joke, but when they did an x-ray, the claim turned out to be true.

It was reported as ‘An Unusual Urethral Foreign Body’ in the International Journal of Surgery Case Report of the same name.

The man confessed to have attempted the weird act on his own to gratify himself on a purely sexual level.

(Purely for interests sake, The
Perspective Research Department, as well as members of the Naked News
staff, are attempting to find out whether it was a dinner fork, or a
pastry fork!)

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As Prime Minister Stephen Harper makes his annual visit to
the North today to observe military exercises, Arctic experts suggest he
would be wise to also take a look at what’s happening in Russia.
Shipping on that country’s Northern Sea Route across the top of the
continent is booming and hauling resource projects in the Russian North
along with it.
Canada may be missing the boat on using Arctic shipping to encourage
development at the same time Russia steams ahead on its own northern
waters.
“At this stage, we’re not really in the game,” said John
Higginbotham, a Carleton University professor and former Transport
Canada deputy minister. “The marathon started some time ago, but we
haven’t even sent in our application yet.”
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We’ve already discussed the odd and somewhat sickening way in which certain mainstream journalists have been clearly cheering on the criminalization
of investigative journalism, but Time Magazine’s Michael Grunwald took
it to a new and incredibly disgusting level this weekend, with a now deleted tweet in which he gleefully announced his eagerness to see the US kill Julian Assange, and then to defend the government for doing so.

This
isn’t just cheering on despicable government actions — including the
extrajudicial execution of a fellow journalist — but it’s saying ahead of time
that no matter what the situation, he’ll be right there to back up the
official party line from the government. Today’s modern journalist,
Michael Grunwald, is going beyond the typical stenographer role of so
many journalists covering the government, to the point where he’s
directly letting the government know that he’ll be their propagandist
backing up a despicable and heinous act.This has nothing to do with
whether or not anyone likes Assange. From all the reports, he seems like
a perfectly dislikable individual. I don’t agree with many of his views
on the world or how he goes about doing certain things that he does.
But I certainly support his ability to stay alive.Of course, this isn’t
new territory for Grunwald and Time Magazine. In “defending” his tweet,
he pointed to a column he wrote a few months ago, in which he directly supports taking away Americans’ rights if it means stopping terrorists.

Eventually,
Grunwald deleted the tweet, but not so much because it’s despicable and
indefensible, but rather because leaving it up, according to Grunwald “gives Assange supporters a nice safe persecution complex to hide in.”
Only an hour later did he apologize, saying that the original tweet was
“dumb.”Either way, why would Time Magazine employ someone who flat out
joyfully proclaims his eagerness to support the US murdering the head of
a competing news organization — one that has shown what a joke Time
Magazine has been in terms of holding the government accountable. What
major government abuse stories has Time broken lately?

MEANWHILE:
The owner of an encrypted email service used by NSA leaker Edward
Snowden could be facing contempt of court charges after refusing to hand
over his users’ information to spooks, according to a recent report.Ladar
Levison dramatically shut down his email firm, Lavabit, after being
whacked with a secret federal court order. Although Levison has not
revealed details of the order, it is likely to have demanded that he
hand over reams of information to investigators working on the Snowden
case.By closing
down Lavabit, Levison may have sought to avoid giving spooks the
information they were looking for.”I could be arrested for this action,”
the rebellious email boss told
NBC reporters.“I would love to tell you everything that’s happened to
me over the last six weeks. I’m just legally prevented from doing so,”
Levison told the Russia Today newsite.http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/19/lavabit_founder_in_hot_water_snowden_nsa_tempora/
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AND THEN TO ADD INSULT TO INJURY!
We got a hint of what NSA defenders would say to try to respond to the latest revelations of thousands of abuses per year
by NSA agents, but late Friday (the best place to try to hide from the
news cycle) we saw the official response plan roll out and, my goodness,
is it ridiculous. The NSA held a conference call, in which it said,
sure, sure, agents had abused the system thousands of times, but it shouldn’t count, because they didn’t mean to:

“These are not willful violations, they are not
malicious, these are not people trying to break the law,” John DeLong,
NSA director of compliance, told reporters.

The majority of these ‘compliance incidents’ are,
therefore, unintentional and do not involve any inappropriate
surveillance of Americans.
As I have said previously, the committee has never identified an
instance in which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to
conduct surveillance for inappropriate purposes.

Two points in response to this. First, John DeLong admitted
during the call that there have been willful violations. Feinstein — the
person in charge of oversight — is claiming that she’s never
heard of an instance of intentional abuse. Either she’s really, really,
really bad at her job and should be removed from the Intelligence
Committee, or she’s lying (and should be removed from the Intelligence
Committee).
Second, the next time someone is accused of a crime, can they just say they didn’t intend
to violate the law and get away with it? Because that seems to be what
the NSA and Feinstein are saying here. Good news for Ed Snowden and
Bradley Manning, right? Both of them have made it abundantly clear that
they didn’t “intend” any harm at all. In fact, they “intended” to help
America. So, based on Feinstein and the NSA’s reasoning, they should be
in the clear, right?
The other talking point, which we’d briefly discussed last week is this idea that because these abuses are such a small part of the NSA’s overall surveillance, this isn’t a problem. The NSA’s DeLong tried this line of reasoning as well:

The official, John DeLong, the N.S.A. director of
compliance, said that the number of mistakes by the agency was extremely
low compared with its overall activities. The report showed about 100
errors by analysts in making queries of databases of already-collected
communications data; by comparison, he said, the agency performs about
20 million such queries each month.

Other defenders of stamping out the 4th Amendment, like commentator David Frum, bizarrely argued that as long as the NSA does more spying, that’s actually better because the ratio of abuse to spying is so low. Uh, that’s not how it works.

Again, going back to the Snowden and Manning examples, for
the vast, vast majority of their lives, neither of them leaked a damn
thing. It was really just one day in their life that they leaked
something. So, according to the reasoning of the NSA and Frum, they
couldn’t have broken the law, since it was such a tiny, tiny part of
their lives, right?
Does anyone actually think these arguments make sense? Systematic
abuses of the system are not okay just because they’re not
“intentional,” and they’re not okay just because they’re a small
percentage of all the spying the NSA does. This is still about the NSA
breaking the law, and then failing to have any real oversight concerning
its activities (not to mention lying about these abuses repeatedly).